Saturday, December 20, 2025

What font has greatest Unicode coverage on Windows 7, 10, 11 and open source fonts



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On Windows 7, the font that comes closest to having the greatest Unicode character coverage is:

Arial Unicode MS

  • This is the built-in (if installed) Unicode font with one of the widest glyph inventories included with Windows/Office.

  • It covers a very large subset of Unicode 2.1, including many scripts and symbols far beyond basic Latin, Greek and Cyrillic. Wikipedia

📌 Important notes:

  • Arial Unicode MS isn’t installed by default on every Windows 7 installation — it typically appears only if you’ve installed certain versions of Microsoft Office that include it. prepressure.com

  • Even Arial Unicode MS does not cover all of Unicode — it covers a huge subset of Unicode 2.1 but not later planes or full modern Unicode. Wikipedia

Other Windows 7 fonts with relatively broad coverage

These aren’t as wide as Arial Unicode MS, but among the standard set shipped with Windows 7, they support many scripts:

  • Segoe UI / Segoe UI Symbol — wide Latin + Greek + Cyrillic + lots of symbols (Segoe UI Symbol added many Unicode symbols in Windows 7). Office Watch+1

  • Calibri / Cambria / Times New Roman / Tahoma — good for many Latin, Greek, Cyrillic blocks (but more limited outside those scripts). Microsoft Learn

  • Script-specific fonts like Ebrima, Microsoft PhagsPa, Microsoft Tai Le etc. — cover some additional scripts but specialized rather than broad. Microsoft Learn

Why no single font covers all Unicode on Windows 7

  • Unicode today spans over 150,000+ characters across many blocks — far more than any one “system font” realistically contains.

  • Windows itself automatically does font fallback: if a character isn’t in the chosen font, the OS tries other installed fonts to render it. Stack Overflow

👉 Summary:

Arial Unicode MS is the best built-in choice on Windows 7 for widest Unicode coverage as a single font — but it still doesn’t cover everything, and it may not be installed unless you have Office. For complete modern Unicode coverage, you’d need to install additional fonts (e.g., Noto or Unifont), as no single Windows 7 font contains all Unicode glyphs.



🥇 Top built-in fonts on Windows 11 for Unicode coverage

1) Segoe UI Variable (System UI font)

  • This is the new default system font in Windows 11. Microsoft Learn

  • It’s designed to cover a wide range of scripts used in modern UI — Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Armenian, many extended blocks, etc. Microsoft Learn

  • But even Segoe UI Variable does not cover all of Unicode — Windows falls back to other fonts for characters outside its coverage.

Good choice if you want the best single “general-purpose” Unicode support among the default fonts.


2) Segoe UI Symbol & Segoe UI Historic

  • Segoe UI Symbol has a very large set of Unicode symbols and dingbats — useful especially for emoji and symbol blocks. Microsoft Learn

  • Segoe UI Historic contains historic and lesser-used blocks (e.g., ancient scripts). Microsoft Learn


3) Lucida Sans Unicode

  • A classic Unicode-aware font included in Windows for a long time; supports many Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and basic symbol blocks. Microsoft Learn

  • However, its coverage is more limited than Segoe UI families.


4) Script-specific fonts (installed by default)

Windows ships many fonts that cover specific Unicode ranges / scripts:

  • Malgun Gothic — Korean

  • Microsoft YaHei / JhengHei — Chinese

  • Leelawadee UI — Thai

  • Nirmala UI — Indic scripts

  • Segoe UI Emoji — color emoji
    etc. Microsoft Learn

Together, these help Windows render a huge variety of Unicode characters, but each font is optimized for particular ranges.


🧠 How Windows handles broad Unicode text

Even though no one font covers all of Unicode:

🔁 Font fallback

If a font doesn’t have a glyph for a given character:

  1. Windows tries a series of fallback fonts behind the scenes,

  2. Picking one that does contain the needed glyph.
    This is how most Unicode text still displays correctly even without a single “everything” font installed. oxygenxml.com


🧩 If you truly need maximum Unicode coverage

Windows’ built-in fonts cover a lot, but for the widest possible Unicode coverage, people often install external fonts such as:

  • Google Noto fonts (huge script coverage across many families) — not installed by default but excellent for broad Unicode coverage. Wikipedia

  • Everson Mono, Unifont, Code2000 (specialized Unicode fonts with many blocks) — also external. Wikipedia

These aren’t part of Windows 11 by default, but if you need nearly complete Unicode support, they’re among the best.



🏆 Best Open-Source Unicode-Wide Fonts

1. Google Noto Fonts (via GitHub repos)

Project: Noto aims to support every script encoded in Unicode. Wikipedia+1

  • GitHub organization: GoogleFonts / notofonts (many repos for different languages/scripts). GitHub

  • Includes fonts for Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Indic scripts, many historic scripts, symbols, etc. notofonts.github.io

  • Licenses: SIL Open Font License / Apache 2.0 (free and open source). GitHub

Key repos / assets:

  • notofonts/noto-fonts (core fonts excluding CJK/Emoji). GitHub

  • notofonts/noto-cjk — Chinese/Japanese/Korean (huge coverage for CJK). GitHub

  • Go Noto Universal — pre-merged broad Unicode fonts: GoNotoCurrent.ttf, GoNotoAncient.ttf, etc. GitHub+1

Go Noto Universal is especially useful if you want a single (or a few) TrueType files that cover huge parts of Unicode — focusing on modern and historic scripts. GitHub

📍 GitHub (example):
👉 https://github.com/satbyy/go-noto-universal GitHub


2. GNU Unifont

  • A bitmap font that aims to cover the entire Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) and many supplementary characters. Wikipedia

  • Open source (GPL-licensed with font exception). Wikipedia

  • Great for exhaustive coverage — but glyphs are bitmap-style rather than scalable vector designs.

📍 (Not primarily GitHub-based, but source is available.)


3. DejaVu Fonts

  • Open-source font family with broad Unicode coverage (Latin, Greek, Cyrillic + many additional blocks). Wikipedia

  • Good general-purpose vector font with many glyphs.

📍 Source & downloads: https://dejavu-fonts.github.io/ Wikipedia


4. SIL International Unicode Fonts (e.g., Charis SIL, Doulos SIL)

  • These fonts have wide Unicode support (especially for phonetic and script inventories). Wikipedia+1

  • Licensed under SIL Open Font License — open source.


🛠️ How to get them

🔗 Noto Fonts (most comprehensive)


🧠 Notes & Tips

✔️ Why multiple fonts are typical:
Unicode is massive — >150,000 characters. No single font file realistically contains all glyphs without being unwieldy. Projects like Noto split coverage per script and region, and some merged builds combine many into one or a few large TTFs. Stack Overflow

✔️ CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean):
Coverage of ideographs is huge, so Noto CJK families are separate but essential if you really need full world coverage. GitHub

✔️ Bitmap vs Vector:
GNU Unifont has very broad Unicode coverage but uses bitmap glyphs. For scalable vector fonts, Noto is a better design choice. Wikipedia


📌 Recommendation

If you want the best open-source font family for maximum Unicode coverage from GitHub:

Google Noto Fonts (with Go Noto Universal merged builds) — best combination of breadth and use-ability. GitHub

If you want true exhaustive coverage of BMP & many SMP code points:

GNU Unifont — almost complete Unicode BMP coverage. Wikipedia



Wednesday, December 17, 2025

Cloudflare's Most Abused Top-Level Domains (TLD) for 2025


Cloudflare’s report on the most abused top-level domains (TLDs) in 2025 is that it highlights which domain extensions are disproportionately used for malicious activity (like phishing, spam, and malware). This impacts trust in those TLDs, increases cybersecurity risks for users, and pressures registries and regulators to tighten controls.

Distrust in Certain Domains When a TLD (e.g., .xyz, .top, .info) is repeatedly flagged for abuse, users become wary of clicking links or engaging with websites under that extension. This damages the reputation of legitimate businesses using those domains.



Friday, December 12, 2025

.NET regular expressions that break Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE) standard


Examples of patterns that work in PCRE but break in .NET

The Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE) library is a set of functions that implement regular expression pattern matching using the same syntax and semantics as Perl 5. PCRE has its own native API, as well as a set of wrapper functions that correspond to the POSIX regular expression API.
The current version of PCRE2 is version 10.47 and released Oct 21, 2025.


Good news a clever programmer created a dotnet wrapper for the PCRE2 library used in Perl supporting 10.47https://github.com/ltrzesniewski/pcre-net/, 1st version v0.1.0 requires .NET 4.5 Framework.


Pattern Type PCRE        .NET        Why It Breaks
Possessive quantifiers❌ Not implemented
Variable‑length lookbehind.NET requires fixed length
Subroutine calls / recursionFeature not supported
Python‑style named groups.NET uses different syntax
Ungreedy mode ((?U))No equivalent in .NET
Recursive named groupsNot implemented
Modern Unicode properties.NET uses older Unicode
\R newline escape⚠️Only supported in newer .NET
Lookbehind with alternationVariable length


1. Possessive quantifiers (++, *+, ?+, {m,n}+)

PCRE supports:

^\w++$

Meaning: match a word string with no backtracking allowed.

✅ PCRE: Works ❌ .NET: Throws “quantifier following nothing” or treats ++ as literal + depending on context.

Why it breaks: .NET simply does not implement possessive quantifiers.


2. Variable‑length lookbehind

PCRE allows:

(?<=\w+)\d+

Meaning: match digits preceded by one or more word characters.

✅ PCRE: Works ❌ .NET: “Lookbehind assertion is not fixed length”

Why it breaks: .NET requires lookbehind to have a fixed, compile‑time length.


3. Subroutine calls / recursion

PCRE supports recursive patterns:

^(\w+|(\((?1)\)))+$

Used for matching nested parentheses.

✅ PCRE: Works ❌ .NET: “Unrecognized grouping construct”

Why it breaks: .NET does not support (?1), (?&name), or recursive patterns at all.


4. Python‑style named groups ((?P<name>...))

PCRE supports:

(?P<word>\w+)-(?P=word)

✅ PCRE: Works ❌ .NET: “Unrecognized grouping construct”

Why it breaks: .NET only supports (?<name>...) and (?'name'...).


5. Ungreedy mode modifier ((?U))

PCRE supports:

(?U)^.+$

Meaning: make all quantifiers lazy by default.

✅ PCRE: Works ❌ .NET: “Unrecognized inline modifier”

Why it breaks: .NET has no equivalent to PCRE’s global ungreedy mode.


6. Recursive named groups ((?&name))

PCRE:

(?<paren>\((?:[^()]++|(?&paren))*\))

✅ PCRE: Works ❌ .NET: Fails immediately

Why it breaks: .NET has no syntax for recursive named groups.


7. Newline escape \R in older .NET versions

PCRE:

^\R$

✅ PCRE: Works ❌ .NET (pre‑.NET 7): “Unrecognized escape sequence”

Why it breaks: .NET added \R only recently.


8. Lookbehind with alternation of different lengths

(?<=abc|z)\d+

✅ PCRE: Works ❌ .NET: “Lookbehind assertion is not fixed length”

Why it breaks: Alternation creates variable‑length lookbehind.


9. Unicode property escapes beyond Unicode 4.0.1

PCRE supports modern Unicode categories:

\p{Script=Greek}

✅ PCRE: Works ❌ .NET: “Unknown property”

Why it breaks: .NET’s regex engine is tied to older Unicode property tables.